


Time Out

by De_Nugis



Series: Hair Shirt 'verse [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-06
Updated: 2012-12-06
Packaged: 2017-11-20 12:06:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/585241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wall fallout and kitten fix-it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Time Out

**Author's Note:**

> for an insmallpackages gift.

Sam threw up on a bus once while he was at Stanford.

He’s had a lot of low points since then, half-strangling his brother, unleashing Lucifer, fucking a demon and drinking her blood type low points, but the memory of puking in the aisle in front of his entire Art History section still comes back lucid and excruciating, between two spikes of pain. 

Brady had helped him clean up. Jess had passed a bottle of water up from three seats behind him. That was maybe a month before the night she leaned across the table halfway through a study session, fisted her hand in his t-shirt and kissed him. Those memories twist in his gut for a whole different set of reasons.

Anyway, the point is, and he does have a point, if he can get to it through the death rattles of the motel AC, the filtered sun through the bus’s windows and the smell of vomit, migraine pulsing from present to past to past to past, the point is, it’s not that he was carsick. If he’d been prone to carsickness, he would never have made it to first grade, let alone Stanford. It wasn’t the motion, it was the double motion. Which sounds like a Spinal Tap lyric, but really, Sam’s serious here.

He leans over the side of the bed, dry-retching into the wastebasket Dean left there. Businesslike almost, at this point. Sam’s got this down to a jagged routine. Then he lies back, heel of his hand pressed above his right eye, back on board his lurching train of thought, the gaps and thud of the ties. 

Movies on buses. Turns out that’s on the list of things Sam can’t handle. Lucifer had extended that list considerably, punctiliously researching, branching out. A hundred and eighty years, give or take; he’d had time, him and Michael. But they’d never hit on that one. Landscape going by the windows at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, film unspooling at its own speed on the tiny bus screens, Sam’s brain stupidly trying to synchronize them, tearing into coronas of light and then constricting into a vise of pain.

They’d been on the way to the Getty, that time on the bus, a weekend trip, with a documentary about the making of a medieval manuscript to make the bus ride educational or something. To this day Sam is unclear on ink made from oak galls and how to treat vellum with chalk. And on waiting outside Dean’s house for the djinns to strike, and on watching blackening flesh and boiling fat while Adam burns.

Dean doesn’t get it. Dean gives him these haunted, worried looks, his own hell in the back of his eyes, and Sam can’t explain to him that it’s not about what he’s remembering. It’s not the pair of cops Sam had called knocking on the front door of an abandoned house. They’d gone down with five vamps feeding on them, while Sam slipped in the side door unnoticed to take out the rest of the nest. It’s not Michael, wearing Dad’s face, professional and disapproving, carving through skin and muscles and organs to search out where Sam went wrong. 

It’s not about any of that. It’s about trying to combine them. His brain is out to sync eighteen months to a hundred and eighty years. His memory doesn’t give a damn about content at this point, scrambling to splice unmatched timelines into stereoscopic vision. Sam’s sure he’ll have time for guilt and trauma and all the rest of it once the synching is done and the goddamn migraines stop. For now he’s mostly too busy throwing up.

Michael’s hands, Dad’s, blur and race, a flying spray of blood. Then it’s Lucifer’s voice in a high-pitched jabber on fast forward. The cop’s barrette is falling off, like it’s sinking through glass. Glass is a liquid after all, flowing excruciatingly down the pane, a decade or a century at a time. It’s the fucking collation that’s going to kill Sam, like the editors of those manuscripts, checking text against text, looking for the discrepancies, trying to get at a synoptic version. 

 

The worst of it is over for today. The blood seeping with agonizing, imperceptible slowness over the blue collar and shiny badge blurs and retreats, archangels’ voices dying off into an intermittent whine like a mosquito somewhere in the room. The hammering pulses of pain are fading. The smell of vomit lingers, but that’s probably because there’s a wastebasket full of vomit next to the bed.

Sam lurches to his feet, makes it to the bathroom. Empties the wastebasket into the toilet, rinses it out, wipes it down with Lysol wipes. They pack Lysol wipes now. Sam’s been doing a lot of wastebasket puking. He washes his hands and splashes water on his face. For a moment his reflection in the mirror is smiling, is Lucifer, and Sam’s head threatens to fall into unequal halves again on the jagged wedge of pain. He closes his eyes and breathes deeply. Not today, not any more today. Please.

The moment passes. Sam goes back into the room and lies on the other bed, the one that smells faintly of Dean. He wonders what time it is. He could open his eyes.

It’s maybe a quarter of an hour before there’s a clatter at the door. Speaking of Dean. Dean’s instincts are calibrated to an uncanny exactitude. Since Sam started chasing him off during these things – Dean’s anxiety coming at him in visible waves, magenta pulses, yet another rhythm, more than Sam could take – he’s never been more than twenty minutes off timing his return. This time, right, he was going to check up on Cas, because Cas has settled here in New Jersey, of all places. 

Sam wonders how that went.

Dean sticks his head cautiously around the door, blinking in the half-light. It’s sunny outside. Looks like afternoon. Sam waves Dean in.

“All clear,” he says. His voice sounds croaky and unused. “I even cleaned up the puke.”

“It’s your puke,” says Dean, “You’d better fucking clean it up.” 

He’s still skulking by the door. He’s got a cardboard box tucked under his arm and a huge plastic bag dangling from his other hand. Sam eyes them with concern. Sometimes if you divert Dean’s caretaking from its direct path it runs amok, and occasionally he buys things. Maybe it’s a personal wastebasket for Sam to puke in, one he can bond with and take from motel to motel and maybe name.

“You coming in?” Sam prods. Dean straightens his shoulders, the way he used to when Dad gave an order, and marches to the bed, sets the box down carefully beside Sam. 

“This was Cas’s idea,” he says, “I had nothing to do with it.” 

Right. Whatever this is, Dean is in it up to his neck. Sam picks up the box gingerly, ready to shake it, just in case.

“Whoa, hey, hey, hey,” says Dean, and he takes the box out of Sam’s hands and begins folding back the top with infinite care. “Be careful. You’ll hurt him. Hey, how’re you doing in there? You ready to come out and meet Sam? The nasty giant with puke breath who just tried to shake you?”

“Dean,” says Sam, “What have you done?”

Dean shoots him a defiant, hangdog look, like he spent their food money on fancy wax for the Impala, or sold his soul again. There’s a soft scrabbling from inside the box. A small, determined paw tipped with tiny translucent claws curls over the corner. Then arrow tip ears appear, and finally a whiskered face. Mostly grey, white around the nose except for a single gray dot. A kitten. Dean came back with a kitten in a box. The kitten and Sam stare at each other.

“What the hell?” says Sam. The kitten refrains from swearing. 

“Don’t blame me, blame Cas. He’s got cats, now. It’s some sort of Godtrip therapy.”

“Cats? Plural?”

“Very plural.”

“And this helps how? Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of why it would mean _we_ have a cat.”

“He gets godly, they smite him. Or shed on him or something. He seems to be kind of enjoying it. We’ll check in from time to time. If we start seeing doilies or smelling cat piss we can stage an intervention. Or if he starts talking to them.”

“The doilies?” says Sam. Cas had gone off the rails, all right, with his kneel-before-Zod act, but Sam can’t imagine him talking to doilies.

“The cats, moron,” says Dean, flicking two fingers towards Sam’s forehead, stopping short like he’s worried Sam’s head might fly off. It’s a possibility.

“Oh,” says Sam. Yeah, he probably should have gotten that. 

“Anyway,” says Dean, “He’s trying this crazy cat lady twelve step program, and it seems like it works for him. And one of the steps might be sending you an apology kitten. Not like I could say no. Right, Oliver?”

The kitten scrambles across the bed and balances precariously on its hind legs to paw at Dean’s jacket. Dean fishes out a plastic packet with a psychedelic cardboard label, tears it, and scatters dried leaf-flakes across the bedspread. The kitten pokes its nose at the leaves and then rolls over and over in them, waving its little white-socked paws.

“Attaboy,” says Dean. “You recognize the good stuff.”

“You’ve had it for, what, two hours?” says Sam, “And you already bought it drugs.”

“He’s not an _it_ ,” says Dean, proprietary and offended. He scoops up the kitten, lifts its bristly little tail, and shoves its butt in Sam’s face. “See? He’s all man.”

Sam peers at the kitten’s tiny, furry balls. This is obviously not the moment to mention to Dean that if they’re assuming responsibility for the creature, even temporarily – very temporarily, no way they can have a cat -- they should get it fixed.

“And I didn’t just buy catnip,” Dean adds, “I got all the other stuff, too. All the stuff the lady at the store said we’d need. Here, hold Oliver so he doesn’t scoot out while I bring the rest in.”

He dumps Oliver in Sam’s hands. Sam splays it against his chest, letting it dig tiny, prickling claws into his t-shirt. He scratches experimentally behind one curious ear. A tiny, bubbling purr vibrates against his ribs.

“Don’t even try it,” says Sam. “Dean’s the softie.” The kitten settles its chin against its paws and goes to sleep.

Dean means _all the other stuff_ literally. Apparently he bought Petco. There’s a fancy dome-shaped kitty litter box, two huge bags of cedar sawdust litter (“it’s better than clay”), a water bowl that plugs in and does a fountain effect, two foodbowls, three brands of kitten food (“we’ll see what he likes”), a brush, a plush catbed, a carrier, little notched scissors for clipping claws, and a dazzling variety of toys.

“Dean,” says Sam, when Dean closes the door after his fourth and last trip to the car, “You know we’re going to have to buy a trailer or something to haul this around with the car. The car we live out of. The car that is not a suitable home environment for a cat.”

“Cas said Oliver enjoys travel,” says Dean.

“How would Cas know?” says Sam. “Maybe he’s been zapping him off to Peru or whatever to see the sights, but that’s different from being in a carrier in the backseat for hours a day. Look, the thing’s cute and all, and I know Cas was trying to do something nice, but we can’t keep it, Dean. It’s not practical. It’s not fair to the kitten.”

“We’ll work something out,” says Dean. 

“What?” says Sam. “We have pretty much the least pet compatible lifestyle on the planet. How about if we take him to Bobby? He never got another dog, maybe he’d like a cat. That way it’s not like you’d never see it. Him. And he’d have a good home.”

Dean’s mouth tightens stubbornly.

“Cas gave Oliver to you, Sam. He’s yours. He’s supposed to help.”

“Yeah, well, maybe Cas isn’t the best judge of helpful,” snaps Sam. Yeah, yeah, glass houses, it’s not like Sam is really in a position to criticize Cas for making some bad decisions, and Cas has offered to help, offered to try to fix Sam. But Sam doesn’t want any more messing with his head. And just because Sam’s balked Cas of his chance to have a go at repairing the Wall doesn’t mean Cas gets to subject Sam to apology kittens.

Dean frowns guiltily, like it’s his fault, what Cas did, Sam not wanting to try to fix it. But he goes on filling the litter box.

“Anyway, we’ve got him tonight,” he says. “How about we deal with the rest later? Maybe you should take a nap or something. Sleep on it. You still look kind of, you know.”

_Awful_ , Sam supplies. Which is probably fair enough. He hasn’t showered, and his left hand is jerking with a spasmodic twitch. Even after his brain has got back on track for the moment, his body is still trying to run on incompatible rhythms. He’d better not have another seizure. Those freak Dean out. They freak Sam out, for that matter.

The longer they leave this hanging, the more Dean will bond with the cat. But that would happen anyway, on the way to Bobby’s. A shower won’t make a difference. And Sam wants to soap off the smell of puke, let the monotonous fall of water wash him away for a bit. 

“Don’t give it more drugs while I’m in the shower,” he says, rooting out clean clothes.

 

“We still headed for Florida tomorrow?” he asks, when he comes out. Dean is fitting the charcoal filter into the water bowl now. The kitten is ignoring the bright spill of toys on the carpet in favor of stalking the paper bag they came in. 

“I was thinking we could maybe skip that job,” says Dean, sitting back on his heels. “Sam, you were puking your guts out three hours ago. That’s three times this month. It could hit you again tomorrow.”

“It shouldn’t,” says Sam, “Not for a couple of days.” So far he seems to be processing in fits and starts, another lurching, queasy rhythm in his life. The memories grip him and shake him for a day, two, and then let up. Sometimes a week or more goes by with Sam seeing only the normal stream of hours, days, minutes, a single current of time. “And the zombies aren’t going to redeadify themselves.”

“Let the locals step in. Boca Raton’s gotta have retired hunters. It has retired everyone the fuck else. And zombies move slow. Even if you’re using a walker or one of those electric things, not likely more than one or two would get away.”

“Dean.”

“And _redeadify_ is not a word.”

“Dean.”

“OK, OK, so we’ll ask Bobby to get someone else in to handle it. Point is . . .” Dean draws a deep breath, abandons the now burbling water fountain, comes to sit on the other bed, facing Sam. “The point is, I’m sick of us climbing back on our feet the moment we can stagger and heading off to try to get killed again. I’m particularly sick of you doing that.”

Like Dean isn’t the worst offender in that department. But it’s true that it’s getting harder. 

“You want to stay a bit at Bobby’s?” asks Sam. “Get Oliver settled?”

It’s not exactly an enticing prospect – Bobby’s worry isn’t a shattering pulse of colored waves, like Dean’s, but it’s still a pressure – but it’s not like the puking migraine routine is fun for Dean, either. Maybe Dean needs to hand some of it off to Bobby for a while.

Dean shakes his head.

“No,” he says, “Not Bobby’s. Listen, Sam. Cas said, he suggested, he said maybe we should get a house. Some kind of place. And I think, I think maybe we should think about it.”

“You want to get a house? For the cat?” says Sam. “Really?” 

He looks at Oliver, who has clawed is way back onto the bed and is exploring it as best he can when he sinks into the comforter up to his little kitten knees at every step. He doesn’t look like he’s working some mind whammy on Dean.

“No,” says Dean. “For us. I’ve been thinking, even before Cas said. With how you’ve been, Sam, we can’t just keep going. We can’t keep going like this. Something’s got to give. And maybe this time _something_ shouldn’t be one of us fucking dying.”

“I’m not going to die of a few headaches,” says Sam. “We don’t have to stop hunting because of this.” 

He’s not sure what will happen, if he stops. It might all accelerate, come flooding in. He might split in two for good. But then sometimes the landscape scrolls past the car windows and the rhythm starts to go out of synch, go haywire.

“I’m not saying stop hunting,” Dean says. “Just take some breaks. Just till your Wall stuff settles down. And maybe after, sometimes. Have a home base.”

When it settles down, that’s when they’ll have to worry. Maybe Dean has begun to suspect that, that Sam may be pretty much no good for good. And he’s trying to get Sam a house the way he’d shoplifted him a teddy bear from the hospital shop, the time Sam had pneumonia when he was six. 

“Dean,” he says. “None of this is your fault. You don’t have to try to fix it with, like, kittens and houses. We can keep going. I can keep going.”

“Maybe I don’t want to keep going,” says Dean. “I’m fucking tired, Sammy. I’m tired of losing things. I’m tired of paying out blood and sweat and souls trying to get them back. I’m tired of going right out and risking them again. You want to go on fighting the good fight, fine. I’m in. We can hunt. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have something else. Doesn’t mean we can’t have something we get to keep. I know it’s not some kind of magic fix. But I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking maybe I want this.”

_Oh_. Dean wanting to get Sam a home is somewhere between touching and high-handed. Dean wanting a home for himself – more, Dean coming out and saying he wants it -- is, well, compelling. Dean wants a house. He wants a cat.

The kitten has given up on the uncharted territory of the bed and settled in a round ball, back on Sam’s chest, only the tip of its tail twitching as it sleeps. Its – his – Oliver’s -- delicate ribcage falls and expands. Sam can feel the tiny triphammer of a heartbeat against his ribs. Two different times, but they’re knit together, warm blood moving inside like it’s supposed to, coordinating with living breath. The warmth soaks down to his own lungs, his own heartbeat, easing them into rhythm. 

Dean is watching him. His face is carefully neutral now, waiting for Sam to speak.

The headache is gone, but it will be back. Sam used to see the future, with his migraines. Maybe he still can. A future where the splicing process will have run its course, where the cop’s blood will stop trickling, an millimeter a year towards her collar with the shiny silver badge, where it will have sunk in. When it’s all found its place in Sam’s brain and he’ll have to remember. 

He might be able to put it off if he keeps running. But some day it will happen. And when it does, when he has to stay, stand his ground, Dean’s offering him a place. He’s maybe going to need all that stuff, Dean will need it, they both will: walls and a roof and a foundation, solid and real and unshockable. And Dean wants this.

“OK,” Sam says. “Let’s look for a place.”


End file.
